Voyeur (2)

The disappearance of the makeshift dwelling that occupied the slice of sidewalk for weeks was dramatic. The evolution of the dwelling from

kariton to hovel had been slow but sure (“Voyeur,” 6/5/18)—a claimed space that, in its final form set against a wall, measured roughly 6 feet by 3, not counting a wooden chair and assorted impedimenta by the “door” and a pile of cardboard and old newspapers at the other end, requiring pedestrians to step from the sidewalk onto the street and thence back up in their progress toward their destination.

Not that, it appeared, they minded too much; by their body language it seemed like just another given factor of life in these parts: an annoyance, but minor, rather like merely having to sidestep dog poop.

But now it’s gone. Sitting trapped in traffic in the dying afternoon, you gawked at the empty space that apparently materialized over the weekend, imagining what in informal-settler communities would amount to a demolition scene marked by violent exertions and piercing cries. Litter—scraps of tarp, cardboard cups from junk food joints, greasy plastic bags—lay on the sidewalk, stirred occasionally by gusts of wind. (Yet another storm was brewing.)

So, you thought, local authorities had finally taken notice of the… thing. It had literally been an eyesore, looming like a curious bump on the side of the road—improv gone wild. But on secret observation, shielded (you thought) by a dark car window, you noted a determined effort at family life under the faded, tattered tarp: an attempt at order (woman sweeping up dead leaves), hospitality (apparent guest sitting on the wooden chair, cheerily nursing a soft drink in a plastic bag), even sanitation (boy dashing out tugging at his shorts, to pee in the nearby creek).

Still, you had wondered how long the hovel would shelter the man and woman that built it, how far it would grow to approximate their concept of home in the middle of the howling street. They seemed to have considered the small tree with overhanging branches to serve as additional protection against the elements, as though, in surveying the hostile landscape, they had staked out the spot, pronounced it suitable, and proceeded after a fashion to build, build, build—but slowly, almost—absurdly—clandestinely, in plain sight.

Once upon a time, you had watched a young couple laden with bulging backpacks walking under the giant posts of the Metro rail, looking upward on a seeming earnest inspection. They stopped at a spot, he gesturing at a particular ledge with intersecting beams, she nodding. He shrugged off his backpack and flung it upward; it landed squarely on the ledge. Perplexed, you turned to your companion, who explained as though to an idiot: It’s where they can sleep. Pwedeng tulugan. It was an occasion to count your blessings.

The hovel now gone was more than a sleeping place for the couple that built it and their boy. It held their worldly goods and the stuff of their trade, along with the odds and ends that they had managed to collect from other people’s lives. It meant an interlude of permanence in their circumstance of homelessness, which made of them nomads, hunter-gatherers in the urban wilderness.

Lately, in the empty space where once the hovel stood, you observe the woman sitting alone beside the family kariton. She watches the vehicles stalled in traffic, seemingly alert to the sounds of the street, her brow furrowing at the heaving mass of metal. Or she rummages in the kariton, arranging and rearranging the bits and pieces it holds. She lingers.

In Alejandro Amenábar’s elegant “The Others,” Nicole Kidman plays a woman who does not know she is dead. She remains in her mansion and behaves as she has always done, keeping to a strict household routine that she imposes on her bewildered servants. She persists in the routine of living despite the gathering fog, despite the intrusive sounds that indicate other presences in the house. She is furious at these other presences and is determined to drive them out.

It is said that the dead always haunt the places in which they died.

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